Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be created uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The benefits will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.