Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website 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 affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

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 among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.