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 because information kept on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One 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 Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account shall be created employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster 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 that we keep require much less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.