Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account will be made works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.