Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.