Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data kept on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared 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 change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.