Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that employs compression in real time should 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 Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive 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. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.