Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field since info stored on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot 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 information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.