Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because data filed on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be generated employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change 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 definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.