Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field as data recorded on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you could have removed by accident.

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 is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.