Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field because data stored on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore any content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's far better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant 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 drive. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they are generated quicker, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.