Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored using the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive 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 enables us to generate backup copies a lot faster and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.