Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data will take less disk space than the original one, so much more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account will be created employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.