Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can 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 any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.