Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info needs much less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have ample 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where the 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 a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.