Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because data located on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just 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 process needs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account is made uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.