Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will take less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all the content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.