Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall 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 could always recover all content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.