Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data needs substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to 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 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 web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they take significantly less space than conventional backups.