Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field as information stored on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code could 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 Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.