Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should 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" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups more speedily and on reduced 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. That way, we can always restore any kind of content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, 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 Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space compared to conventional backups.