Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data takes less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all of the content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's significantly better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and are generated faster, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.