Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because data recorded on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover the content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and are generated faster, which enables us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.