Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information needs less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be made employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect 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's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.