Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how data 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 ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's much better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.