Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have enough power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.