Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary 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, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to 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 data can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.