Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info requires much less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough power to support that feature. 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.