Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will take substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.