Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that attribute. An example how info 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 storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's significantly better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.