Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any kind of content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.