Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field as info recorded on hard disks is generally compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies quicker and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all of the content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.