Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field as data stored on hard disks is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

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

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.