Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field as information filed on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find 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 much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.