Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on HDDs is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on less 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. In this way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.