Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have adequate 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet 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 stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.