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 considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate numerous daily backups of the entire content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to benefit from this feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.