Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support that feature. 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 keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

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 is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude 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 save them for a month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.