Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting 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 especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.