Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will require less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient 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 saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot 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 quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less 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 stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's far better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.