Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field because data recorded on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account is generated employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't 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, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.