Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because data kept on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all the content that you could have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can benefit from the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.