Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info needs considerably less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace 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 entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be generated employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.