Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as data kept on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method consumes a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website 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 site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which 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 owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.