Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field since data stored on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be generated works by using the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.