Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info needs much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any web 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.