Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that feature. 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large 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 a lot of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.