Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data needs much less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.