Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will require much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support that 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.