Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.