Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info requires much less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.