Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will require less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace 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 Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.