Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will take much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative 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 is among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.