Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.