Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information 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 storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all content that you may have removed by mistake.

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 positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.