Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.