Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal 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. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's far better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website 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 a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.