Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info requires much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

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