Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. 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 saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they take significantly less space than ordinary backups.