Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored 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 very quickly, 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 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 distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of numerous clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they take a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.