Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information kept on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be created works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains will be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.