Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info requires considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info 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 saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.