Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will take much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

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