Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information located on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based on 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 needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be created employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
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's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.