Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

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 one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.