Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups a lot faster and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.