Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data needs less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it 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 owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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 drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.