Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field as data kept on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. 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 Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as 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 much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.