Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of multiple 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 a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space than standard backups.