Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information filed on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.