Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field as information kept on hard disks is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly 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 present will function quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.