Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you can 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 considerably quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster 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 lots of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need considerably less space than traditional backups.