Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data requires much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the 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 web hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.