Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will require less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

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 is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.