Data Compression

Learn more about the advantages of data compression. Understand how it works as well as what data will be compressed.

Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from 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 differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web 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, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of numerous clusters working together. Together with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take a lot less space than standard backups.