Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. 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 Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any content that you may have deleted by mistake.

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 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 at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.