Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field as information recorded on hard drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method consumes a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. 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 web servers where your content will be stored.
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 is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.