Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be made works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.