Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this feature. An example how information 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 Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet 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. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.