Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field as data recorded on hard disks is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process uses plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example 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 Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is created works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's significantly better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.