Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because data kept on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially 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. That's why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.