Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how data 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 saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account shall be generated uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.