Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field since info stored on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.