Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field since info stored on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only 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 needs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example 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 Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.