Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since information stored on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.