Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info needs less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how info 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 saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all of the content that you may have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In combination with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.