Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data needs considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be made employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.