Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information needs substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have enough 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 sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm available 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you will 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 differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web 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 is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take significantly less space than ordinary backups.