Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information stored on hard disk drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.