Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will require substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how information 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 whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates 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. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can 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 require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.