Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field as information located on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.