Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field because info filed on HDDs is often compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One 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 Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups more rapidly and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all of the content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.