Data compression is the reduction 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 data recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process consumes a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
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 called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.