Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore the content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will 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 quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data 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 an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.