Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting
account on our end since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot 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 generate backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server
account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is far better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.