Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info needs much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting


Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server 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 hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, especially with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.