Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data needs much less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample 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 saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.