Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can 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 cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is far better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.