Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 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 employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.