Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information needs considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, 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 performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes 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. Along with the better 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 keep them because they need a lot less space than standard backups.