Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information located on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An 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 Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.