Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups a lot faster and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and are generated faster, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.