Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster 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 quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space compared to standard backups.