Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field since information filed on hard disks is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process uses a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially 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. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups 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 influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.