Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field as information located on HDDs is often compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved 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. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website 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 because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.