Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info kept on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take advantage of the feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.