Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud 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 greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.