Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot 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 disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet 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 web 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 affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.