Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard disk drives is typically compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be made employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's significantly better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.