Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as info located on hard disks is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance 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 Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find 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 a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.