Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because data stored on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.