Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data needs less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have enough 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 storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account is made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our 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 among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best 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 speed up any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.