The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.