Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on lower 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 could always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of 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'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.