Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies much quicker and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.