Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data needs much less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough 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" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be generated employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence 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 hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website 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 owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.