Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will require considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also 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 because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover any content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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 accelerate any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.