Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have adequate 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is made uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.