Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot 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. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all of the content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.