Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is generated uses the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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 quicken any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.