Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as info stored on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which 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 certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.