Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how info 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 keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any 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, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud web 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 very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the 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 disk drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.