Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared 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 site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved 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 allows us to make backups much quicker and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.