Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data kept on hard drives is usually compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore any kind of content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's a lot better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.