Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that attribute. 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that 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 certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will boost every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.