Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why Internet 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. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.