Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We are able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.