Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field because information recorded on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.