Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field since info stored on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be generated works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.