Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field as data filed on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will 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 as they take considerably less space than ordinary backups.