Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will need much less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how info 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 storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep 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 some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.