Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field as data located on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you may have erased by mistake.
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 one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.