Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account shall be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the full content in each 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 because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect 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 definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.