Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of 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'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.