Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process uses plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account will be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The benefits will be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.