Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all the content that you could have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite 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 just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.