Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info 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 storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster 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, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space compared to conventional backups.