Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because data kept on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method requires plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.