The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data quick 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that 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 take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they take a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.