Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field because data kept on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough so as 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 consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.