Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly 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. This is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.