Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need considerably less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites 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 which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need significantly less space than traditional backups.