The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this 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 unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.