Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field because data stored on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough 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 web hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be created uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.