Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will take considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more speedily and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.