Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information stored on hard disks is generally compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code may 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 runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced 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 stored.

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 is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.