The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially 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 performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk 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 a problem for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll 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 keep them since they take considerably less space than standard backups.