Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk 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. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's a lot better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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 drive. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.