Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field since data filed on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.