Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will require less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is far better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.