Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that employs compression in real time should 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 keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website 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 disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to benefit from this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.