Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info 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 actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account shall be created employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in numerous 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 faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.