Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes much less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute 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 that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

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 surpasses any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.