Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that 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 whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly 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 present will function faster. We can benefit from this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.