Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field because info located on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. 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 most companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.