Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will take much less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which 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 is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.