Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.