Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all of the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take advantage of the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.