Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data requires much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that 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 allows us to generate backup copies more rapidly and on reduced disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.