Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

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 website 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. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.