Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the internet hosting field as data located on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space than conventional backups.