Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information needs considerably less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which 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 allows us to make backups faster and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly 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. That is why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.