Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will need less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.