Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace 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 actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

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