Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they take considerably less space than standard backups.