Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information takes less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't 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, so as to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take a lot less space compared to conventional backups.