Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field because information filed on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could 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 cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is generated uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.