Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field since data filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting
account is created works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make numerous daily backups of the entire content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting
plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very 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. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.