Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough 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 consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.