Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field because data recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration 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 Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every site hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can benefit from the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.