Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data requires less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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 hard disk drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.