Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field because data located on hard disks is generally compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration 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 Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to benefit from this feature despite 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 never make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather 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 an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.