Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information located on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.