Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since information stored on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal 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 generate backups a lot faster and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard 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 because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they need a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.