Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account will be made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound unreasonable, 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 boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really 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 30 days. This way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.