Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to take full advantage of the 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 do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.