Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field as data kept on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web 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. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to 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 take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.