Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because info stored on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough 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 sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.