Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as info stored on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, so 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 sequential 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 hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but 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 make backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any kind of content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.