Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because information kept on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance 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 internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in every single Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they need a lot less space than ordinary backups.