Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since info kept on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.