Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be generated uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.