Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have enough 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.