Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will require substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

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 one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of site that runs on a platform where this 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. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.