Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field as data located on hard disk drives is generally compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information 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 erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly 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. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.