Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field as info kept on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process requires plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also 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, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they take a lot less space than traditional backups.