Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud 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 quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.