Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.