Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field as data kept on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This method consumes plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration 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 Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every 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 disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. 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 hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that 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 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.