Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

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

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 certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies 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.