Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because information located on hard disk drives is generally compressed 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 just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.