Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.