Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to 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 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 semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.