Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info requires less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how data 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 storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites 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 is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they need considerably less space than conventional backups.