Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll 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 decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any website that runs on a platform where this 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 to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.