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Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info requires much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how info 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 storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a shared web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of 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 of the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.