Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data will require considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to 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 separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they need considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.