Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will need less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various 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 is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space than standard backups.