Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as information located on HDDs is often compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need a lot less space than conventional backups.