Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info kept on hard disks is generally compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.