Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info needs substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.