Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard disk drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.