Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field because information kept on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.