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 web hosting field due to the fact that data filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are 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 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. 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. Along with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need a lot less space than ordinary backups.