Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your website hosting account is made works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because 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 semi-dedicated server plans that 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 in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.