Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info takes less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space than standard backups.