Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared 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 quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster 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 which we keep need much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.