Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info takes less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website 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 disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.