Data Compression
Learn precisely what Data Compression is and find out how it could affect your sites and the experience of your visitors.
Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
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Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your
website hosting account is generated works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in many 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 a lot faster. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your
semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.