Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field since data located on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us since not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much quicker and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover the content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.