Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account is generated employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible 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 hard drive. Because of this sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.