Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on hard disks is usually compressed so as to take less space. There're many different 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 can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method employs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept 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 very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
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 works with a compression algorithm called 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 particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take advantage of the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.