Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, 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 distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they need significantly less space compared to traditional backups.