Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as info filed on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This process uses plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account is made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.