Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info stored on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An 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 cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account will be created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Even though it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.