Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field since information kept on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account will be generated employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains will be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as 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 web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.