Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field as info located on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with 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 hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need significantly less space compared to conventional backups.