Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field since info kept on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. 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. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.