Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account will be generated employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also faster. The benefits may be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last backup 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 fast enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.