Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field because data stored on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.