Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info will take substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content might be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.