Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field since data recorded on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can 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 that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.