Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field since information kept on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take considerably less space than traditional backups.