Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because information filed on HDDs is often compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process requires plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.