Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly 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 performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud website 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 very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take a lot less space than ordinary backups.