Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account is made works by using the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The benefits may be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.