Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will require much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space than conventional backups.