Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field because information stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created much quicker without loading the servers.