Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

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's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.