Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how info 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that 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 considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several 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 will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server 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 web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. 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 backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.