Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is far better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.