Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but 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 due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all content that you may have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.