Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info needs less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, 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 drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.