Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data needs considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. 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 quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.