Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data takes less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be created employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.