Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info located on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.