Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account with us because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all of the content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.