Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will require much less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample 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 saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account will be generated works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.