Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more effectively 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, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more speedily and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you can always recover any content that you delete by accident.