Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field as info recorded on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need considerably less space compared to traditional backups.