Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info located on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that a 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 sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal 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 enables us to generate backups at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you could have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.