Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be made uses the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than typical backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.