Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could 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 ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Besides the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need a lot less space compared to conventional backups.