Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information stored on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account shall be generated works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially 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 websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.