Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs 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 significantly less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.