Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account will be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.