Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all content that you may have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.