Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example 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 Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.