Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard disks is often compressed to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting 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 named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.