Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need much less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.