Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will need considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that 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 make backups more speedily and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken every 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 numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.