Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as data filed on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account with us because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's a lot better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much 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 faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.