Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field as data stored on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One 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 Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.