Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field since info kept on hard disk drives is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly 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 HDD. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.