Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data requires less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.