Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info kept on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example 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 Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account shall be generated uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies 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.