Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info needs less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. 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 entire code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.
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 is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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 drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.