Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field because information located on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.