Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field as data filed on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than 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 as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.