Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored on the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which 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 for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all the content that you may have deleted by mistake.

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 is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.