Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will need less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups quicker and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all the content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.