Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field since info kept on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code can 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 compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all of the content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites 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 web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space compared to standard backups.