Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.