Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field as information recorded on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code may 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 compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk 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. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover any content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.