Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this feature. An example how info 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 Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker 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 kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info 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, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover 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 significantly less space compared to standard backups.