Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field as data located on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Many 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 data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably 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 faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.