Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info 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 saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.