Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data takes much less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number 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 subsequently will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.