Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard 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 allows us to make backup copies more speedily and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.