Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field as info recorded on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be generated uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.