Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will take considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept 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 extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
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 uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.