Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field as info filed on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it 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, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all of the content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is far better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.