Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.