Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.