Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will take substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this 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 storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all the content that you may have erased by accident.

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 among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost 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 numerous 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 have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.