Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field since data located on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also faster. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space compared to conventional backups.