Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that 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 storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore any kind of content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups 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 keep them since they take considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.