Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as data stored on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you will 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 really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which 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 definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.