Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's far better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take significantly less space and are generated faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.