Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.