Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is created employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you will be able to 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 distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space compared to traditional backups.