Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as information stored on hard disks is typically compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need significantly less space than ordinary backups.