Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information will require less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support that attribute. 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 keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they take considerably less space than conventional backups.