Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will take less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they need considerably less space than standard backups.