Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many 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 the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups quicker and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any content that you may have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.