Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will need much less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored on the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info 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 keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account is generated works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.