Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field because info filed on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster 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 which we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.