Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because info kept on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore the content that you could have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.