Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info filed on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We are able to benefit from this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.