Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups 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 extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.