Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field because info located on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account shall be made employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits may be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.