Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will require less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

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 certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.