Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough 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" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups much quicker and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore any content that you may have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which 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 positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.