Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will require much less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting 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 much better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially 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 hard disk. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of your files and databases.