Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies quicker and on less disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the 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 drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take significantly less space than conventional backups.