Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.