Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field as data filed on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they are generated faster, which enables us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.