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 internet hosting field since info recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account will be made employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, 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 upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.