Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field because info located on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.