Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field as information filed on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be generated works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as 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 present will function faster. We can benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.