Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field as info located on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD 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. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you may have removed by accident.
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 is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.