Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information kept on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be generated employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.