Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field because info recorded on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough in order 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 sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that 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 function quicker. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.