Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info takes substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups faster and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all of the content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.