Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will require less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace 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 whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's 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 will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.