Data Compression

Learn precisely what Data Compression is and discover how it may affect your websites along with the experience of your visitors.

Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as info recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One 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 Shared Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is created uses the advanced 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 that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.; Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.