Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will require considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.