Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups a lot faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need significantly less space than traditional backups.