Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info filed on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method requires plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code can 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 will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.