Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.