Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will need much less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.