Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.