Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially 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 overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is significantly better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.