Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field as info located on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website 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. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.