Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as data located on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method requires plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find 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 disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.