Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be generated uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in every single Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they take considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.