Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they need considerably less space than conventional backups.