Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because information located on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups more speedily and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all the content that you could have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.