Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info requires less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored on identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that attribute. 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can 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 drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, especially 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 comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can 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 since they need a lot less space than traditional backups.