Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute 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 whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.