Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field as info filed on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method uses plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be generated employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains may be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and are generated faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.