Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information located on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method consumes a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is generated uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.