Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have enough 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.