Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just 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. The process requires plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.