Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same 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 deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how info 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 storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.