Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field as info kept on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be generated uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.