Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field because information filed on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.