Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

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 among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created much quicker without loading the servers.