Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate 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 consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall 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're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
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 distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need significantly less space than standard backups.