Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored on the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.