Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires less disk space than the initial one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.