Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field since information stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is significantly better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take significantly less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.