Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data needs less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.