Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will require substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account is generated employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits will be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the whole content in every single Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of 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
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you can always bring back any content that you erase by accident.