Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will need less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups faster and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.