Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 whole code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.