Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field because data located on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

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 works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.