Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info needs substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

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

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web 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, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.