Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard disks is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any kind of content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.