Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data requires much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must 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 saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other 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 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 drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.