Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info requires less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how info 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively 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 since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to 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 HDD. Because of this websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.