Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary 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 every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.