Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing 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 additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that 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 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 disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.