Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data needs less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because 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 require a lot less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.