Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have sufficient 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done 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 offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.