Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field since data recorded on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process consumes a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account is made uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website 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 disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.