Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have sufficient 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the 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 known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.