Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will take much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which 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 outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.