Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because info filed on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any kind of content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.