Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info takes substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info 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 saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.