Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data needs much less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account shall be generated employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every website 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 anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change 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 is 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 will 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 accelerate any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.