Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have enough 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is made works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Besides the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they need significantly less space compared to conventional backups.