Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will need much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored on the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing 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 called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore any kind of content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.