Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.