Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field since info located on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be made uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits will be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there 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 as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.