Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data will take much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also considerably quicker. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker 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 mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need a lot less space than conventional backups.