Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced 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 which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly 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 faster rate 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 present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.