Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field because data filed on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 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 internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover any content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant 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 drive. Because of this sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.