Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will take less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several 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 erase by mistake.