Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have ample 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be made works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster 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 make multiple daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.