Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field since data filed on hard drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, 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're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.