Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will require less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require 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 Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows 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 considerably quicker without loading the servers.