Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.