Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since info stored on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method employs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to 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're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available on the market 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 more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.