Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will need much less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially 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. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from 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 differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your 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 because it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they need a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.