Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.