The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed 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 information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored 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 extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting 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 company, 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 separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need a lot less space compared to traditional backups.