Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field since information stored on hard drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space compared to conventional backups.