Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard disks is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.