Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take much less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.