Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information kept on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is generated employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in each hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.