Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field since information recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.