Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field because info recorded on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that 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 considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore the content that you may have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which 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'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.