Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field since data filed on hard disk drives is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty 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 sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be generated works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.