Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field because data stored on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. 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 Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which 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 certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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 drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.