Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.