Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
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's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for 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 regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.