The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your 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 which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.