Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field since info filed on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but 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, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all the content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.