Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed 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 website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups quicker and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. 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, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.