Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups quicker and on lower disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore the content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.