Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data requires less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from 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 web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space than traditional backups.