Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can 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 drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take significantly less space compared to traditional backups.