Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data 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 quicker. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.