Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information needs less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored on the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared 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 website hosted in a shared hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various 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, that 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 create backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.