Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as info recorded on hard disks is generally compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration 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 Cloud Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be created works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in every single web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.