Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space than traditional backups.