Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.