Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will require considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud 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 on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.