Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will need much less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard 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 fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.