Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info filed on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups faster and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore any content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data 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 disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.