Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web 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 is among 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'll 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 any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.