Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because information stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An 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 Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account shall be generated works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content like website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be created much quicker without loading the servers.