Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data kept on HDDs is generally compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example 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 Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more rapidly and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.