Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will take less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

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