Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will require less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this 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 consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there 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 more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.