Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field because information recorded on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. 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 web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.