Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field as data located on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be created much quicker without loading the servers.