Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information takes much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account is made uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior 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 is also a lot quicker. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.