Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info needs substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.