Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field since information kept on hard drives is often compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.