Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info takes much less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that employs 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account will be made works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also considerably quicker. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which 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 best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.