Data Compression

Learn precisely what Data Compression is and find out how it could affect your web sites along with the experience of your website visitors.

Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on hard disks is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates 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 website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need a lot less space compared to standard backups.