Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info requires less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much quicker and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore any content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and are generated faster, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.