Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as info filed on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We're able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.