Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data requires substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so 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 in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how data 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 storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you can 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. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less 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 stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they take significantly less space than ordinary backups.