Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more speedily and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.