Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on HDDs is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could 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 ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared 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 quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days 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 more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.