Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored on the same amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you will 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 the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.