Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough power to support that attribute. 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 Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account with us since not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all of the content that you may have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.