Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field because data stored on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.