Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field because info stored on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example 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 web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups a lot faster and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.