The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have ample resources to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the 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 faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of 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 just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they take considerably less space than traditional backups.