Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information needs less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how information 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 keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than various 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 quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and are generated faster, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.