Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample 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 consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups faster and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any kind of content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.