Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard drives is often compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.