Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will take substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that attribute. An example how information 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 saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is created uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also faster. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is significantly better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and are generated faster, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.