Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info needs less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have ample 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" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

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 website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number 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 will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.