Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field because information filed on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing information 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 erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies much more rapidly and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is significantly better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.