Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need much less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all of the content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.