Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info takes less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups faster and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore the content that you could have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.