Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info requires much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.