Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on hard drives is often compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups faster and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies 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 recover any content that you erase by accident.