The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud 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 extremely 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

If 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 used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they need considerably less space compared to ordinary backups.