Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you'll 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 differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they take significantly less space than traditional backups.