Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info stored on hard disks is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account shall be made uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to 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 since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.