Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field because information filed on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take significantly less space compared to conventional backups.