Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info filed on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot 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 drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.