Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field since info filed on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very 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 Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.