The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, 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 other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they need a lot less space than ordinary backups.