Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field because info recorded on hard disk drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot 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. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies faster and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.