Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info takes less disk space than the original one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups a lot faster and on lower disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover any kind of content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.