The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably 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 faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they take considerably less space compared to conventional backups.