Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.