Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field as information filed on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending 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 once your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as 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 sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be generated employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.