Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field as info located on hard drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method consumes a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can 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 cloud hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also considerably quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.