Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that 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 whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is generated uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The gains will be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take considerably less space than conventional backups.