Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field as info located on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.