The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space compared to conventional backups.