Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups much more rapidly and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they are generated quicker, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.