Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because info filed on HDDs is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be generated uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits may be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.