Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info needs much less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which uses 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.