Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field because data kept on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account shall be created employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is greater in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible 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 hard drive. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.