Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info takes less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute 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 Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.