Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field since data stored on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting 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 differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to conventional backups.