Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field because information filed on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be created employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible 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. That is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.