Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is 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 significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all content that you may have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.