Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will need considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data 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, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.