Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace 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 Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account will be made works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site 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 whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.