The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One 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 actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, 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. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard 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 better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space than traditional backups.