Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this feature. An example how data 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be generated works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also faster. The benefits may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the full content in every single web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.