Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll 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 much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take significantly less space compared to standard backups.