The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

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

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting 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 Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website 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 plenty of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.