Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will take less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this 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 saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all of the content that you could have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.