Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information stored on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code can 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 is created works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also faster. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market 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 quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.