Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better 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 take much less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.