Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups faster and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all the content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's significantly 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 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.