Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more speedily and on lower disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover all content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.