Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will take less disk space than the initial one, so extra content might be stored using identical amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular 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 websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.