Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information requires less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored using the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely 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 higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.