Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate 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" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be made uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's significantly better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated quicker, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.