Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. 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 at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is significantly better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.