Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.