Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using identical 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 erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that uses 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.