Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data requires less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more speedily and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.