Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info takes much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that feature. An example how data 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 Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.