Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.