Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate 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 saving the actual 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 exceptional ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of 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 can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.