Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer 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 out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.