Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information requires less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data 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 owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.