Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because information recorded on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process consumes a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We can take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.