Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have enough 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" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be created works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The benefits will be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.