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 internet hosting field since info kept on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.