The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are better for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A 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 particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect 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 from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space than conventional backups.