Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field since information stored on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, 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 drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud 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 very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster 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 better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.