Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field because information stored on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take significantly less space compared to conventional backups.