Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info kept on hard disk drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code could 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 Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.