Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require 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 stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of numerous clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need significantly less space than conventional backups.