Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies 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 Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.