Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data takes less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all content that you may have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need significantly less space compared to traditional backups.