Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have ample 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover all content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.