Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will take less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is 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. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than all 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 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.