Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field as info kept on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies faster and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover all content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.