Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field because data filed on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with 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 because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.