Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info needs considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that attribute. 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 keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be created employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that 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 influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken any kind of site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.