The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed in the course of 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, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must 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 how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is 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 much quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space than traditional backups.