Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.