Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because information located on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can 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 that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably 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 faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared 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 kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they take significantly less space than traditional backups.