Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have ample 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, especially 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.