Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will take much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies 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 Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.