The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action must have ample resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're 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 require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially 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 plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.