Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method employs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.