Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
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's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.