Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need considerably less space compared to conventional backups.