Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information located on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you could have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.