Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your website hosting account is made works by using the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly 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 supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting 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.