Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the 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 which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.