Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will require substantially less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored using 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 erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is generated uses the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also considerably quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every 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 because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.