Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.