Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info recorded on hard drives is often compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is made works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains may be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet 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 hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher 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 drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.