Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's 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 huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet 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 faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites 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 cloud website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites 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 web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need a lot less space compared to conventional backups.