Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data requires less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.