Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field since info recorded on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.