Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field as data stored on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order 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 consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more rapidly and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore 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 is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is significantly better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.