The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Together with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they take a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.