Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will require much less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any 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 hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups a lot faster and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that 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 web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.