Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned 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 disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the 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 extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing website 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 a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you'll 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 an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space compared to traditional backups.