Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field since data located on hard disk drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. 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 Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard 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 stored in the 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 fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take significantly less space compared to traditional backups.