Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account will be created uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.