Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information recorded on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process uses a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it's also considerably faster. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.