Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is created employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also considerably faster. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in every single Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.