Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's a lot better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.